May 2023

26

May

Moritz Rehm successfully defended his doctoral thesis '"50 Years of Crises: The Development of the European Financial Assistance Regime", supervised by Prof. David Howarth. On Moritz's examination committee were Professors Amy Verdun (University of Victoria), Michele Chang (College of Europe), Dermot Hodson (Loughborough University) and Anna-Lena Högenauer (Chair, University of Luxembourg) and Dr. Win Van Aken from the European Stability Mechanism.

25

May

Prof. David Howarth presented on "Financial Regulation and Governance in post-crises EU" at the conference: "Finance Governance after the Crises: Challenges to EU, Latin America and the World", at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

24

May

The students of the Master in European Governance discussed sustainable migration, development cooperation and climate change with the President of Cabo Verde, José Maria Neves.

15

May

The Institute hosted 50 visiting Canadian BA and MA Political Science and European Studies students. The students are in Europe for three weeks visiting EU, international and various national institutions.

04-06

May

Doctoral researcher Laura Pierret participated in the EUSA conference in Pittsburgh. She presented the draft paper "Unconventional Monetary Policies and Moral Hazard: Constructing or Deconstructing the Legitimacy of the European Central Bank’s New Instruments?’" co-authored with Prof. Michele Chang (College of Europe) and Prof. David Howarth. She also acted as the chair and discussant of the panel "The Evolution and Accountability of Pan-European Public Financial Institutions" organized by Prof. Howarth and Prof. Dermot Hodson.

05

May

Prof. Howarth’s project “Banking on Europe” organized a panel at the EUSA conference in Pittsburgh. Postdoctoral researcher Lukas Spielberger presented the draft paper “Building the European Union’s Second Financial Arm: Incremental Change and the development of the European Commission as a borrower” and two colleagues from London, Dermot Hodson and Iacopo Mugnai presented additional papers. Doctoral researcher Laura Pierret from our institute acted as a discussant and provided very helpful comments for all three papers.

04

May

Postdoctoral researcher Lukas Spielberger published a policy brief entitled “The Commission’s borrowing operations: A closer look at the new diversified funding strategy”.

April 2023

25

April

The Master in European Governance launched the Uni.lu Diplomacy Lab. The students of the MEG presented their first online publication in the presence of Foreign Minister Asselborn, Member of the European Parliament Tilly Metz and several ambassadors of Luxembourg as well as representatives of civil society. 

27

April

Farida Valieva, a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Howarth, successfully defended her thesis. Farida has been working on the ongoing divergence of national banking supervision in the context of the European Single Supervisory Mechanism.

March 2023

23

March

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer, Prof. David Howarth and Prof. Lucia Quaglia published a special issue on Banking Union in the Journal of European Integration. 

15

March

Thomas Schoos started his PhD on the extent to which Luxembourg can export democratic resilience through its climate finance partnerships under the supervision of Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer. 

08

March

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer discussed the chances of women to assume positions of political leadership in Luxembourg in Contacto: O próximo Governo do Luxemburgo poderá ser liderado por uma mulher.

February 2023

23

February

Mechthild Roos, a former PhD candidate in the Institute of Political Science under the supervision of Prof. David Howarth, was awarded the German Bundestag's prestigious science award for 2023 (and €5000) for her book based on the PhD thesis that she wrote at the University of Luxembourg. Mechthild's The Parliamentary Roots of European Social Policy. Turning Talk into Power was published by Palgrave. Mechthild is currently a researcher at the University of Augsburg.

17

February

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer contributed to a New York Times article on Luxembourg's support for Ukraine: How a Tiny NATO Nation Tackled a Big Problem: Arming Ukraine.

10

February

Prof. Josip Glaurdić and Dr. Christophe Lesschaeve of the University of Antwerp published an article titled "Choosing Women in Postwar Elections: Exposure to War Violence, Ideology, and Voters’ Gender Bias" in the journal Politics & Gender. The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? The article answers this question using a rich dataset combining extensive information on thousands of candidates, as well as communities affected by war violence.

02-03

February

A team of five uni.lu students went to Brussels to simulate a negotiation of EU climate legislation with students from across the European Union. The team was given the task to push for ambitious climate legislation with strict deadlines and tight standards. Thanks to extensive networking and coalition-building with other national teams, they successfully negotiated a good compromise. Congratulations to “Prime Minister” Elvira Jörg, “Minister of the Environment” Sana Hadzic, “Ambassador” Stefan Markovic, “national experts” Kloris Vjerdha and Bram Koers and their coordinator Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer.

01

February

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer analyzed Luxembourg's response to the Covid crisis in her contribution to the book "Governments' Responses to the Covid-19 Crisis in Europe".

January 2023

13 

January

Prof. David Howarth presented on the accountability of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in comparative perspective at the EBRD headquarters in London. The presentation was linked to Professor Howarth's ESRC-FNR funded project, Banking on Europe (with Dermot Hodson, University of London).  

09

January

Fabrizio De Francesco joined the Department of Political Science as a visiting research fellow (January-August 2023). He is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Previously, he has been a visiting researcher at the University of Heidelberg, University of Lausanne, and University of Leiden. His research on regulatory institutions, the diffusion of administrative reform, and transnational governance has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Public Administration, Socio-Economic Review, and Swiss Political Science Review. Fabrizio has co-edited with Claudio M. Radaelli an Elgar Companion to the OECD which will be forthcoming in 2023. His recent research projects focused on how European governments established SDG monitoring and evaluation systems, and communicated to the public during Covid-19. During his visit, Fabrizio will collaborate with Prof. David Howarth on the interdependence of FinTech and GovTech in European countries, including Luxembourg. More information on his research is available here. 

December 2022

16

December

Elisabeth Epping (Robert Harmsen supervisor), Martin Sacher and Sébastien Commain (David Howarth supervisor), three former members of our Institute, received their PhD diplomas at the university ceremony. Paolo Balmas (LISER) was co-supervised by David Howarth.

09

December

The Master in European Governance students Rebecca Issai Okine and Jessica Kress organized the roundtable “Women in Positions of Power” with the support of Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer. Invited speakers were Finance Minister Yuriko Backes, Member of the European Parliament Tilly Metz, local councilor Jana Degrotte, the Director of ADEM Isabelle Schlesser and Professor Dr. Djamila Aouada.

November 2022

29

November

Prof. David Howarth's book Bank Politics: Structural Reform in Comparative Perspective (with Scott James, King's College London) was published by Oxford University Press. A number of current and former Institute members and Masters in European Governance students assisted Professor Howarth with the research for this book — including Moritz Rehm, Sébastien Commain, Mia Dzepina and Margot Bouchez.

25

November

Doctoral candidate Ramin Forghani examined the EU policy towards Iran as well as the Middle East more generally in the TEPSA Explainer.

24-25

November

Post-doctoral researcher Dimitrios Argyroulis, Profs. Anna-Lena Högenauer, Joana Mendes and Nikolaos Vagdoutis organized the workshop “Ditching the Maastricht Model? The Evolving Role of the ECB in the EMU”.

18

November

Doctoral researcher Alexandre Mortelette has been featured in an article by Research Luxembourg where he describes his background, his motivations and his doctoral project.

16

November

Prof. Josip Glaurdić and doctoral researcher Leo Fel published an article titled "Structural stability despite increased fragmentation: The 2021 county elections in Croatia" in the journal Regional & Federal Studies. 

14

November

Prof. Josip Glaurdić was interviewed by the Croatian weekly Globus about the principal findings of his ERC project "Electoral Legacies of War."

09

November

Prof. Josip Glaurdić commented on the midterm elections in the United States for Delano.

03

November

Dr. Helen Kavvadia published a paper entitled “Using Business Models in hindsight”, in the Journal of Business Models. The paper introduces a method where business model evolution can document the evolution of organizations as well as facilitate future planning. 

October 2022

31

October

Prof. Josip Glaurdić and his team were featured on the University front page on the occasion of the completion of their ERC-funded project ELWar. The University also produced a video summarizing the project's main findings. 

25

October

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer discussed the appointment of Rishi Sunak as the new British Prime Minister on the German TV station Phoenix.

September 2022

24

September

Giuseppe Montalbano and Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer were interviewed by RTVE on the Italian elections. 

15

September

The Institute of Political Science welcomed Dávid Szabo, who has been awarded an AFR grant to write his PhD on “Greening Europe’s agriculture: discourses, policy design and sustainability transition pathways”.

05

September

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer discussed on the ORF news why references to Thatcherism play an important role in the leadership race of the British Conservatives. 

01

September  

Susana Matos started working as a funded PhD student under the supervision of Professor David Howarth. She obtained an AFR from the Luxembourg FNR to work on Green Monetary Policy in comparative perspective.

01

September

Igor Tkalec, a former PhD student in the Institute of Political Science moved from a research fellow position at the Robert Schuman Institute at the European University Institute to start work as a Lecturer at University College London.

01

September

Prof. James Cross, from University College Dublin, assumed his position as a visiting professor in the Institute of Political Science for the academic year 2022-23.

01

September

Our institute’s former doctoral researcher Martin Sacher, who successfully defended his dissertation in April 2022, started a position as project manager at the Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau in charge of mobility, environment and spatial planning.

August 2022

30

August    

Dr. Michal Mochtak and the PhD candidate Ensar Muharemović have had an article titled “The Abyss of Ethnic Division: Two Decades of Discussing War in the Parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina” accepted for publication in the journal Ethnopolitics. The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites.

11

August    

Dr. Helen Kavvadia, co-authored with Prof. Judith Clifton Daniel Díaz-Fuentes an article entitled "The European Investment Bank and its role in financing public water" published in Water International. The article explores the logic of EIB lending to the water sector in general, and to public water in particular, demonstrating, a slippage in the period 1991-2021, as a process of levelling up meant the EIB distributed water lending more evenly among member countries.    

July 2022

22

July

Prof. Josip Glaurdić, together with Dr. Christophe Lesschaeve and Dr. Vladimir Filipović, published an article "The Failure of “Yugoslavia’s Last Chance”: Ante Marković and his Reformists in the 1990 Elections" in the journal Nationalities Papers. The last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia Ante Marković was considered by many within the country and in the international community to be Yugoslavia’s last chance for a peaceful transition toward democracy and capitalism. In spite of his popularity, the Reformist party he created failed decisively in the first democratic elections of 1990. The authors' analysis shows that the party’s failure had little to do with the voters’ exposure to the effects of the free market reforms undertaken by Marković’s federal government during this period. Instead, the Reformists suffered at the hands of a strong negative campaign by the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević, and they were squeezed out by the ethnically based parties that benefited from voters behaving strategically in the electoral marketplace dominated by questions of nationalism.

20-21

July

Dr. Helen Kavvadia co-organised a conference on "European Public Banks and their Development Role: Interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the past, present and future of European development finance", sponsored by the Robert Schuman Initiative for European Affairs and the Institute of Political Science of the University of Luxembourg, The University of Manchester and The University of Padova. Prof David Howarth participated with a paper co-authored with Prof Desmond Hodson entitled "Team Europe’ or the Battle of the Banks: Explaining the Evolution of Pan-European Development Finance".

15

July

Laura Pierret, a doctoral candidate in Political Science won the prestigious annual Pierre Werner Foundation doctoral research prize. The funding recognises both her excellence as a PhD researcher and the importance of her thesis topic to the legacy of Pierre Werner.

07

July

Prof. Anna-Lena Högenauer was interviewed by Phoenix TV about the reasons behind the resignation of the British Prime Minister and the impact of this event on British politics.

June 2022

28

June 

Doctoral candidate Anđela Mićanović has been featured by Research Luxembourg.

27

June

Dr. Olena Polovko joined the Department of Humanities of the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg in 2022 as a Visiting Researcher. Her research interests comprise political conflicts, geopolitics, political terrorism, extremism, and psychological aspects of politics. Additionally, her interdisciplinary research connects politics with visual art and literature. Currently, Olena works on analysis of the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Anna-Lena Högenauer. Olena completed her PhD "Features of political terrorism in modern society" in the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

20

June

Prof. Josip Glaurdić, together with Dr. Christophe Lesschaeve and Dr. Michal Mochtak, published an article "Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Southeast Europe: (Non-)Believers, Social Network Bubbles, and the Discourse of Blame" in the journal Problems of Post-Communism. Using survey and social network evidence from Southeast Europe, the authors advance the understanding of conspiracy theories and politics related to the coronavirus pandemic in three ways: (1) they show that beliefs in coronavirus conspiracy theories are related to ideological support for a nationalist vision of society and socialist vision of the economy; (2) they also show that both conspiracy believers and nonbelievers are living in bubbles of the like-minded; and they we use the tools of natural language processing to elucidate the unambiguous differences in the discourse related to the coronavirus used by conspiracy believers and nonbelievers.

14

June

Doctoral candidate Anđela Mićanović co-authored a report on Montenegro's brain drain.

10

June

Dr. Helen Kavvadia co-edited with Lucia Coppolaro (University of Padova) the first ever academic book on the European Investment Bank (EIB) "Deciphering the European Investment Bank: History, Politics, and Economics", published by Routledge. The book includes chapters by Prof David Howarth and Helen Kavvadia, as well as of other 16 authors from different European Universities.

06

June

Dimitrios Argyroulis, a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute published "The European Semester: An Ordoliberal Construct?" (early view online) in the high ranking interdisciplinary Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS).